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Body Confidence & Self Love- 3 Questions to Ask Yourself

I’m sure that you read a thousand articles and blog posts about body confidence and self love. I also know that it all looks so good in theory but nobody mentions that it’s really hard in the practice. It’s easy to give advice and mean well, I did that myself as well, but we are all at a different stages of our body confidence and self love journey which makes it hard to apply does advice's personally. Words are great for encouragement and motivation but the action is what makes the biggest change. I don’t want to just tell you to love your body as I’m sure that you want to but somehow you got lost along the way. I want you to ask yourself these questions and maybe they'll help you to get back on track again.

“Why I don’t love my body (without which I wouldn’t be able to live)?”

We don’t even realize how lucky we are that we are alive and that we are able to walk on this beautiful Earth that we call home and make a change. It doesn’t even matter in which shape, weight, gender or race. Your body and mind are in such a deep connection that we are not even aware of. When our mind hurts so does out body and vise versa. So when you feel bad, ashamed and at the end ungrateful for your body your whole being is in pain. You, yes you are the unique creature and nobody on this planet is like you. If that’s not a good enough reason to love yourself then I don’t know what is. Sometimes we have a hard time realizing that if someone ells tells us that we are beautiful and incredible human beings we won’t believe it because we don’t believe that ourselves so we think that why should anybody else think that way about us.

It’s not our body that is ugly or imperfect it’s our mindset. Body confidence isn’t about starting hundreds of different diets and wanting to change our body quickly as possible, it’s about realizing that nobody is perfect but that isn’t something bad. I want you to write down the things that you don’t like about yourself and objectively think about them and then write the things that you love about yourself. If there is more bad things than good go back to the bad ones and decided what you can do to change that or find the way to accept them. Because if you are only going to think bad about yourself and your body and not making a change you’re going to miss all the amazing things in life.

“When did this body hate started?”

Everything has beginning and the end. Nothing starts without a cause. Nobody is immune to body shame and self doubt. There must’ve been a certain period, month, day or hour in your life when your mindset changed. For most people that happens in their adolescence years when we are going through big mental and physical changes in our lives. Our body doesn’t feel like ours and so does our mind. It’s the time when you might have felt confused, ashamed and scared. If that’s the time that you started to lose all your body confidence just think was that really reasonable. I’m sure that if you look back at photos of you from that time that there is absolutely nothing you should’ve felt bad about, your body image wise.

For some it might started later because of some event or person. We sometimes so easily accept when somebody tells something offensive to us but the compliment we can’t take without thinking that they are just joking. When you take everybody’s opinion personally it’s normal that it will build up and push down your confidence. Even if you used to think that there’s nothing you need to change about yourself. It doesn’t even need to be a someone you know, just looking at the magazine or any social media, especially Instagram, you may feel like you’re not looking how you’re supposed to. Body confidence and self love isn’t something we need to try to achieve for a season and then go back to our usual state of mind. We need to think about it as a lifestyle. You need to make it something so normal like having a breakfast or going for a walk. It should be blended with your everyday life.

“Am I willing to make an effort?”

Everything important is so hard to get but so worth working for. You have this one life and one body and to be honest we don’t have that much time. So wasting your time on body hate is just so unreasonable, ungrateful and unnecessary. It's completely normal that in some days you just don't feel good about yourself but those kind of days should be in minority. Complaining about your weight or body shape is just stupid. You really just have two simple options. Either you are going to accept your body as it is with its all imperfections or you are going to start working on the parts you want to change. But here’s the catch. You can’t and shouldn’t want to make a change to please the others and the stereotypical thinking of a society we live in. If the foundation of your change is someone else then it’s not a good foundation. In my opinion one of the best foundations is your health.

When you start working out and eating healthy let your mantra be “I want to be the healthiest and best version of myself.” The reason I don’t like to say “I want to lose my weight and look XY way.”, is because that can easily get you into the world of comparison. Setting yourself unhealthy goals is also bad. Rather than to have a weight lose as your goal, make your goal to have a more defined and toned body. When you focus too much on numbers it can get overwhelming and you can get too obsessed with it. You just need to find what works best for you. Even the little changes and achievements will take body confidence and self love on another level. So if the answer to this question is “Hell yeah!!!” then right now is the perfect time to start. One step at a time and you'll get there.